How to include additional directories when configuring makefiles

Question

I'm trying to compile geany-plugins-1.28. The debugger plugin (the only one I need) gives the error:

debug.c:53:21: fatal error: vte/vte.h: No such file or directory
#include <vte/vte.h>

Clearly it needs to know where this file is located to compile. I found the vte.h file in the src directory of the main program geany-1.28. When running

sudo ./configure cflags=-I/home/pi/Desktop/geany-1.28/src

I get the same error about the missing header later trying to compile the debugger plugin.

I ran

./configure --help 

to get all the flag options. The output is here

How do I get this to configure correctly so that it compiles. I need to compile the debugger version 1.28 myself because apt only installs 1.24 which I think has a bug because it crashes when I run my code with the error:

close failed in file object destructor:
sys.execpthook is missing
lost sys.stderr

Answer 1

As in this answer stated, vte.h is not the file you are looking for. Install libvte(-dev) package on your system and rerun configure.

Just for the record: vte.h on Geany is a dummy to allow Geany to kind of dynamical enable vte or disable it depending on vte is installed on the system or not.

Answer 2

CFLAGS is case-sensitive environment variable, so you should set it before running configure, not try to pass it as a command line argument. This variant:

$ export CFLAGS=-I/home/pi/Desktop/geany-1.28/src
$ ./configure

leaves CFLAGS set for current shell until you leave it. While this:

$ CFLAGS=-I/home/pi/Desktop/geany-1.28/src ./configure

sets variable only for current command, i.e. configure.

Some other issues:

• You do not need sudo to configure and make. It is also unnecessary for make install if you set PREFIX to a path you have privileges to write to.
• Does plugin's build system also builds all it's dependencies? If not, you may face linker errors a bit later.

Update:

I have tried to build debugger plugin and got rid of your error. It seems that vte.h coming with Geany is it's intrinsic, while the plugin requires full-featured file from the library. So I just installed vte and vte-devel from repos. Nevertheless, I got some other unrelated errors coming from Glib. I will not continue my attempts to build all this right now. Hope my effort will be helpful at least a little.